Mecklenburg County Department of Social Services chief Mary Wilson said the recent controversy concerning some of her hiring decisions was sparked by “positions of entitlement,” not race or gender.

Speaking to a friendly audience today at the Tuesday Morning Breakfast Forum in West Charlotte, Wilson said that under her nine-month tenure at DSS, “the playing field is being leveled,” and not everyone is happy with it.

Before she arrived at DSS, she said, a select few controlled much of the personnel and career movement within the county agency. “I’m changing that,” Wilson told the group, “and that has been a really big hurdles for people to overcome.”

Some Mecklenburg County commissioners raised questions this month after news reports revealed that Wilson had hired three employees with family ties to high-ranking public officials. One was Samara Foxx, the wife of Charlotte City Council member and mayoral candidate Anthony Foxx. Also hired was the daughter of Charlotte-Mecklenburg police Chief Rodney Monroe, and the daughter of Resident Superior Court Judge Yvonne Mims Evans.

Wilson rejected the notion that the hires amounted to cronyism.

“Cronyism is hiring unqualified people,” she said after the event. “No one has said (Samara Foxx) is unqualified. That is the ugly piece of all of this.”

Wilson repeated her earlier contention that she hired Foxx as a special assistant because she was best equipped. The two also had worked together in the private sector. Wilson said she needed a trusted assistant who could help her implement badly needed change at DSS.

Some of the toughest criticism centered on the fact that Foxx, who makes $100,000 a year, was hired during a DSS employment freeze. The job was posted for one day.

Wilson said that in retrospect she might have posted the job longer, but the outcome, she said, would not have changed.

“If we had posted that job for a year I still would have hired Samara Foxx,” she said. “I knew Samara Foxx before Anthony Foxx knew what politics was.”

As an example of the changes she has implemented at DSS, Wilson noted that for the first time ever, county residents applying for benefits needn’t visit the agency’s main office on Billingsley Road. A new intake office opened recently at Freedom Mall in west Charlotte, which is close to about 45 percent of the agency’s clients, Wilson said. A second intake office is being considered for east Charlotte, she said, which would serve about 33 percent of DSS clients.

Wilson said she also instructed her staff to seek county exemption from a state regulation that denied DSS benefits to people who own a car valued at $2,500 or more. With the recession forcing more workers into unemployment, she said, Mecklenburg DSS was rejecting as many as 1,000 people per month based on that regulation. Many had once earned six-figure incomes, she said.

The state recently approved the county exemption, Wilson said, and her agency soon will begin notifying previously rejected families of the change.

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